Create dashboards in BI or Tableau of your customer satisfaction data

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May 2022

If your organisation uses Microsoft BI or Tableau as a reporting tool to create dashboards from various data sources, then you can easily add a module to view customer satisfaction or NPS scores by accessing SightMill data directly from your BI tool.

Business insight tools such as Microsoft BI or Tableau are widely used to create dashboards and reports of business metrics from data sources across a business. Typically, they would pull data from the accounts system to show revenue or profit, from the sales system to show pipeline growth, from warehousing or facilities to show capacity and flow. And why not add in customer satisfaction by highlighting your NPS score over time?

Both Microsoft BI and Tableau have a range of connector tools that allow them to link to a wide range of platforms and data sources. You can either integrate directly, use an API or import a data file.

BI and Tableau can access your SightMill data using its REST API – which is an industry standard way of requesting and accessing data. Once connected, BI can extract survey results for a particular date range, or project and display this graphically as part of a wider business dashboard.

An alternative route is to import one of the data export files from SightMill into the BI tool – this requires manual work, so it’s not as streamlined as using the API but it needs no technical skills so might be easier as a starting point.

To connect BI using the REST API

Your SightMill account is already setup to accept REST API calls. You’ll need to authenticate your BI tool into SightMill (we use the standard oAuth system).

Access your oAuth account authentication details
You will find your authentication details in your Account/Profile, scroll down to the Client Credential section and you see your Client ID and Client secret that you need to use in your BI tool to authenticate in to SightMill.

Once authenticated (ie once BI and SightMill are able to communicate), you can run commands from your BI platform to query and extract data from SightMill. Use our API reference to help you build these https://sightmill.com/docs/api 

To start the process from Microsoft BI, you can use:

  • one of the BI add-ons that simplify support REST API access
  • (if your version supports it) you can use the built-in web interface (go to Get Data, select Web and then fill in the SightMill end-point described in our API docs and authenticate using the Client ID from your SightMill profile.

To use a data file with BI

First export the data from SightMill:
  • go to your Project and click the Admin tab
  • scroll down to Export and select the date range
  • you can now export the full survey data for this project over this date range as a CSV file.
Microsoft BI tool can import this and use the data to display an element in the dashboard.

By using your existing business insight tools, you can embed your NPS results into your business dashboards to share across your organisation.

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